If I had any money. If I could get away from these ghouls. If I wasn’t afraid of the
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Supreme Bishop’s proctors. If I didn’t think it would get my arse shot off in the
air.
Lizzie has promised to buy me a harness for Pixel. Not to walk him on a leash
(impossible!) but to carry a message. The bit of string around his neck that I used
on my last attempt apparently did not work. He may have clawed away that bit of
paper, or broken the string.
Ishtar set a date seventeen months after my arrival in Boondock for rendezvous with
the persons involved in rescuing me in 1982: Theodore/Lazarus/Woodrow (I have to
think of him as three persons in one, like another Trinity), his clone-sisters Lapis
Lazuli and Lorelei Lee, Elizabeth Andrew Jackson Libby Long, Zeb and Deety Carter,
Hilda Mae and Jacob Burroughs, and two sentient computers both animating ships, Gay
Deceives and Dora. Ishtar had assured Hilda (and me) that seventeen months would be
long enough to make me young again.
Ishtar pronounced me done in only fifteen months. I can’t give details of my
rejuvenation because I knew nothing of such details at the time – not until I was
accepted as an apprentice technician years later, after I had become the Boondock
equivalent of RN and MD. At the medical school hospital and at the rejuvenation
clinic they use a drug tagged `Lethe’ that lets one do horrid things to a patient
but not have him even recall that they happened. So I do not remember the bad days
of my rejuvenation but only the pleasant, lazy ones during which I read Theodore’s
memoirs, as edited by Justin… and I spotted the authentic Woodie touch; the
raconteur lied whenever he felt like it.
But it was fascinating. Theodore really had felt moral qualms about coupling with
me. My goodness! You can take the boy out of the Bible Belt, but you can never quite
take the Bible Belt out of the boy. Not even centuries later and after experiencing
other and often better cultures utterly unlike Missouri.
One thing in those memoirs made me proud of my `naughty’ son: he seems to have
always been incapable of abandoning wife and child. Since (in my opinion) much of
the decay that led to the decline and fall of the United States had to do with males
who shrugged off their duty to pregnant women and young children, I found myself
willing to forgive my `bad boy’ for all his foibles since he never wavered in this
prime virtue. A male must be willing to live and to die for his female and their
cubs… else he is nothing.
Woodrow, selfish as he was in many respects, in this acid test measured up.
I was delighted to learn just how intensely Theodore had wanted my body. Since I had
wanted him with burning intensity, it warmed me all through to read proof that he
had wanted me just as badly. I had never been quite sure of it at the time (a woman
in heat can be an awful fool) and was still less sure of it as the years wore on.
Yet here was proof: eyes open, he shoved his head into the lion’s mouth for me – for
my sake he had enlisted in a war that was not his… and `got his arse shot off as
his sisters expressed it. (His sisters – my daughters. Goodness!)
In addition to Lazarus’ memoirs, I read histories that Justin gave me. I also
learned Galacta by the total-immersion method. After my first two weeks in Boondock
I asked that no English whatever be spoken around me and asked Teena for the Galacta
edition of Theodore’s memoirs and reread them in that language. Soon I was fluent in
Galacta and beginning to think in it. Galacta is rooted in Spanglish, the auxiliary
language that was beginning to be used for trade and engineering purposes up and
down the two Americas in the twentieth century, a devised language formed by taking
the intersection of English and Spanish and manipulating that vocabulary by Hispanic